Employee safety

When it comes to diversity, our (local) management teams have 228 members, with 68% men and 32% women. Ardo is an international group with headquarters in Belgium, and Mrs. Gabrielle Kalkwijk, our CEO, has Dutch nationality.

We recognise the need to accelerate our efforts to increase diversity in our leadership and management teams. As a result, we introduced the Tiara1 Leadership Programme. It brings together female managers from different Ardo sites and countries to help them improve their personal leadership skills and strengthen their internal network. We now have 45 women enrolled in the programme, divided into several groups, with an additional 24 women ready to join the programme. The plan is to expand even further each year.

2. Employee safety

Our top priority is the safety of our people. To fulfil this commitment, we work on various levels on a daily basis to reduce the risk of accidents. To monitor our employees’ occupational safety, we use the international standard of the injury frequency rate as a KPI on workplace accidents.

Definition

The number of accidents resulting in more than 8 hours of absence for employees, temporary and external workers per million working hours.

Between 2018 and 2021, the frequency decreased from 32.9 to 22.6.

Our objective is to decrease the number of accidents per million hours to below 20 in 2022, and to below 10 in 2030. And every incident is one too many.

Respecting our employees

32.91

203 30.55

197 27.87

181 22.66

138

2018 2019 2020 2021

Injury frequency rate (IFR) >< Injury frequency index (IFI) = #occupational accidents per million working hours

Occupational Health & Safety is a subject of grave concern for the agri-food sector, and we take our responsibility in the chain seriously by encouraging safe behaviour, to protect our employees, sub-contractors and visitors to our sites, to ensure that they remain safe at all times . This goes beyond our sites, with initiatives that support our farmers and contractors on the fields .

We actively work to improve our group-wide safety culture through a variety of initiatives that protect our employees’ safety . With human behaviour recognised as a crucial factor in ensuring a safe workplace, in 2019 we launched an ambitious safety behaviour programme in collaboration with an external workplace safety consultant . Another example involves our plants and machinery, where we are constantly inspecting, maintaining, and improving the technical safety of our new and existing equipment .

We established a core safety team from different departments to assist local safety officers as well as emphasise the importance of safety throughout the Ardo group . The goal of this set-up is to collect and share best practices and improve factory communication .